Despite recent technical progress, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is headed into its peak year of spending with less schedule margin and fewer funding reserves than anticipated for the $8 billion flagship astronomy mission as it advances toward a planned 2018 launch. Less than three months into the current fiscal year, NASA says the JWST program has lost one of 14 months from its development-schedule margin due to the October government shutdown, which interrupted the first of three thermal vacuum tests and bumped the spacecraft's critical design review (CDR) to January from December.
展开▼
